Reusing Your Candidates' Assessment Results

Updated by Amy Thomas

There are times that candidates might apply for multiple jobs with your organisation, especially during large recruitment drives like graduate campaigns. If these jobs include any of the same tests, this can mean the candidate is taking the same test multiple times.

Multiple results for a candidate can contribute to the following issues:

  1. Poor candidate experience: Taking the same test multiple times may cause friction in the candidate experience. 
  2. User confusion: Multiple results for the test for the same candidate can also contribute to a confusing experience for you. You might wonder which result is accurate or if a candidate who took a test multiple times has an unfair advantage. 

To reduce the impact of these, when a user is invited to take tests, if they have taken any of those tests recently, their previous results will be automatically copied into the job. 

Turning the Reuse Results function on or off

By default, this feature is turned on for your Criteria account and is set to reuse results for candidates who completed testing for up to 12 months.

This can be disabled in Company Preferences by an admin user.

Click the avatar in the top right corner and select Company Preferences.

Scroll down to “Reuse Results”. Click the toggle to disable or enable the function or select a new time frame from the dropdown list.

Click “Save Company Preferences” at the bottom of the screen.

Inviting candidates to complete testing: copy results to new job

When the reuse results function is enabled for your Criteria account, you do not need to take any special action to have the results from the candidate’s previous attempt copied across to your current job.

Note that the results for the test that your candidate completed previously must be visible in your Criteria account in order to reuse them. All assessments in the test battery need to be completed before the results become available. If your candidate completed the test previously but did not complete the full test battery, those results are not available and therefore cannot be reused. For example, if the candidate was previously invited to complete two assessments but only completed one, the results will not appear in your Criteria account.

Invite your candidates to complete testing as per usual. Click here for instructions on how to administer a test.

All assessment results are copied

If the candidate has completed all of the tests you are inviting them to (within the reusing results time-frame set for your account), they will not receive an email regarding this invitation for this job.

This is because there are no outstanding tasks for the candidate to complete.

Note that as all test results for the candidate were reused, these can be viewed straight away in the candidate card.

Some assessment results are copied

If the candidate has completed some of the tests you are inviting them to, (within the reusing results time-frame set for your account), they will receive an invitation email to complete the remaining assessments.

That is, when they open their invitation, they will only see the tests that they still need to complete.

You can see that some of the candidate’s results were copied from a previous job by viewing the notes in their candidate card. This will show the job that the results were copied from and which user copied them (who set up the invitation).

Once the candidate has completed all of the remaining tests in the test battery, the results for all the tests will become available.

Inviting candidates: candidate to complete test again

If you want a particular candidate to complete the test again, for example, they had technical issues when they completed the test last time, you can bypass the reuse results function when setting up the invitation. (Note: if the Reuse Results function is disabled for your account, this option will not appear when you create your candidates' invitations.)

In the job, click “Invite”. Enter the candidate’s details and click “Add”.

Click “Advanced Settings”.

Toggle the Reuse Results setting to off. Click Invite.

The candidate will be sent the invitation to complete all of the assessments in the test battery.

The Reuse Results function only applies to candidates who you have added to the system. When you use open links in your recruitment process, your candidates will add their own details when they begin testing.

To stop candidates from completing testing multiple times through the open link, you can add testing restrictions to your account. This will prevent candidates from creating new records in your account generally, or for a particular job, for the time period you specify. Click here to learn more.

Additional Resources

Administer a test


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